and here www.vincenzoemanuele.com/dataset-of-p... you may also find dataset on new parties and party system innovation updated for 2025.

5/ @vincenzoemanuele.bsky.social & Bruno Marino test Lipset & Rokkan’s famous freezing hypothesis w fresh data, finding some conditions for freezing L&R hypothesize are *not* associated with cleavage structuring and other societal/institutional factors were overlooked.

bsky.app/profile/vinc...

This is the first output of the NEWCOMING project— newcomingproject.weebly.com . We are indebted to our project’s colleagues who collaborated in designing our original survey data. Happy to discuss the paper with anyone working on cleavages, party systems, or identity politics in Europe!

So what?
👉 Parties face a fragmented society shaped by multiple cleavages.
👉 Representation is harder.
👉 Voter alienation may grow if parties can’t bridge diverging social groups.
A challenge for European democracy in the 2020s and beyond.

🔍 Our method matters too.
We’re the first to operationalise Bartolini & Mair’s cleavage theory using survey data, covering structure, identity, and party representation.
Check out the design if you’re working on cleavages or identities!

The conflict between skilled vs. unskilled workers?
It qualifies as a cleavage — but a separate one.
We find little overlap with cultural conflicts.
So, there’s no unified “transnational/globalisation cleavage” on the demand side.

💡 On the “new” side:
• Ethnonationalism vs. Cosmopolitanism
• Traditional values vs. LGBTQ+ rights
• Economy vs. Environment
These 3 overlap socially and politically — and form a multidimensional GAL/TAN cleavage.

Which cleavages are most structured?
💥 The class cleavage remains very strong.
🌱 The GAL/TAN cleavage (green/alternative/libertarian vs. traditional/authoritarian/nationalist) is also robust.
But not all old (or new) conflicts make the cut.

Key findings:
❌ We reject the idea that (all) old cleavages have vanished.
❌ We also reject the notion of a single globalisation cleavage.
✅ Western Europe is shaped by multiple, distinct cleavages — a mosaic rather than a monolith.

We stick to a classic definition:
A cleavage must meet 3 criteria:
1️. Socio-structural
2️. Normative (Shared group identity)
3️. Organisational (Having political representation)
No cherry-picking. We assess all conflicts using the same standards. 🔍

We designed an original survey across 7 Western European countries 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇮🇹🇳🇱🇪🇸🇸🇪🇬🇧 to evaluate 8 socio-political conflicts, both “old” (Rokkanian) and “new” (globalisation-related).
And we asked:
Which of these are really cleavages?

Cleavage theory is alive and well — but the debate is split:
📉 Some say old cleavages (like class) are in decline.
🌍 Others point to a new “globalisation” cleavage.
But few studies test both within the same framework. We do.

We show that left parties have historically reduced most forms of #inequality but their equalizing effect has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s.

Implication: political science must rethink how it classifies party systems. Before asking which type of system exists, we must first ask: is there a system at all?

The big picture: the old labels (unipolar, bipolar, multipolar) capture only fleeting snapshots. In many countries, instability itself has become the rule. In those contexts, classifications are useless for long-term accounts.

Results indicate that many systems have become ‘non-systems,’ with fluctuating and unstable party poles.

We define party systems based on the number and composition of relevant political poles (governing alternatives) and, through a long-term analysis of Western Europe (20 countries since 1945), assess their degree of systemness.